Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Inter-community Travel

One of the main things I noticed in
this document was how Kolvenbach emphasizes the Jesuit institution’s emphasis
on students’ participation in community service. He writes that students at
Jesuit universities are encouraged to go out into the community, whether they
are tutoring drop-out students, working in soup kitchens, or participating in
social demonstrations (35). Through this kind of service, students hopefully
will become adults who more aware of their communities. What I noticed here was
that going out into the surrounding community becomes a kind of travel for
students at Jesuit universities. It is easy to live in a community and only see
one part of it. By going out and doing service, students learn about parts of
their communities that they have never seen before. As Kolvenbach says, “the
students need the poor in order to learn” (37). This idea is especially
significant, because it emphasizes that the purpose of community service is not
to make the student feel more righteous or morally superior. Kolvenbach says
that community service is about creating symbiotic relationships between the
student and the community; the student performs a service for their community,
and the community gives back by giving the student new experiences.

Community service can also be a
form of travel simply in that students may travel to areas or neighborhoods in
their communities that they have never been before. Although these areas may be
geographically close, they can still be completely foreign to students. For
example, at the Tunbridge service learning prep session, we talked about how
the school is only a few minute walk away, but most of the Loyola students had
never been in the areas in which many the Tunbridge students live. We also
learned how this is not completely accidental, as the city government uses one
way streets to avoid common traffic flow in these areas. Despite this, these
areas are near to the institution, and therefore form part of our community.
Service learning encourages us to learn about those areas in our own
communities that might be otherwise hidden from us.

This
idea in particular made me think of community service as a form of travel. When
someone travels to a place, they pick up parts of that place, and carry them
with them as they journey throughout life. By performing community service,
students gain experiences that will help shape them into the adults they will
become once they leave the university. And as Kolvenbach says, the experience that
students gain by reaching out to the parts of their community that may have
been hidden to them before will help shape them into “adults of solidarity in
the future” (35).